Shortly after Toni and Jorge Colón Nevares purchased a buff-yellow-and-terra-cotta stucco villa on the grounds of the Dorado Beach hotel, outside San Juan, Puerto Rico, they asked José Solís Betancourt to design it. The Puerto Rican-born, Washington, D.C.-based designer looked around the property and said to his clients, "This wonderful new house is right on a golf course, and you don't golf. It is very near some nice beaches, and you don't go to the beach. You do have a fine collection of paintings and sculpture. I'm going to turn the house into an art museum."

The Colón Nevareses' paintings, most of them by internationally recognized Puerto Rican artists, are in vivid Caribbean colors, so Solís Betancourt and his partner, Paul Sherrill, decided that the house would serve as a neutral envelope for the dramatic artworks. The floors are travertine, the window shades are woven bam-boo, and the concrete walls were troweled with light taupe plaster. "They have a nice dappled finish," Sherrill says. The names of the soft hues in the house suggest serenity: A sisal area rug in the double-height living room is "timber," and a high-back chair nearby is uphol-stered in "surf." The bed in the master bedroom is upholstered in "ginkgo"; the pillow shams in a guest room are sage.

"Toni and Jorge's main residence is in the San Patricio section of San Juan," explains Solís Betancourt. "It's very 1970s and quite formal. They use the Dorado villa as a weekend house. We've deliberately made it casual, with rustic touches." He bought old wood beams, which he used on the ceilings of the master bedroom and several other rooms. The same wood forms the cornice of a guest room, which has a pyramidal ceiling. For the dining section of the living room, he and Sherrill purchased a trestle table and designed two benches to go on either side of it. The benches are covered in woven raffia, trimmed at the bottom with tape that is ornamented with nailheads; forged-iron handles are on either end so they can be moved easily. The designers also selected a few antiques for the house, including a 19th-century leather trunk for one of the guest rooms. "The house is contemporary, but with Spanish colonial references," Solís Betancourt says.

The two then incorporated the art. Jorge Colón Nevares's favorite painting, Luces, a diptych by José Morales, hangs on the wall behind the trestle table. Arnaldo Roche-Rabell's semiabstract painting La Bicicleta is on an adjacent wall. Solís Betancourt put a 19th-century bicycle, purchased by Jorge Colón Nevares 10 years ago in Spain, on a beam, where it looks pleasingly like a circus bicycle on a high wire.

The couple entertain frequently, so they bought a piano and set it in a corner of the entrance hall. Jorge Colón Nevares doesn't play the piano, yet he loves piano music. "We have a piano in San Patricio, but I wanted to surprise Jorge with one for our Dorado house," says Toni Colón Nevares. "I wouldn't shop for anything without José. He helped me choose the right size piano in the proper wood."

The Colón Nevareses' four children and seven grandchildren visit often and enjoy the island's benevolent climate, which allows year-round alfresco dining. A lush, palm-framed courtyard at the rear of the house, overlooking the golf course, can be tented for large parties. For some gatherings the Colón Nevareses use the front of the house, where a large Angel Botello bronze sculpture of a reclining woman, La Recostada, is in the entrance courtyard.

"I don't think most other clients would have trusted us to place their most valuable sculpture in a courtyard," Solís Betancourt says. "They would have wanted it in the living room. Placing the Botello at the beginning of the house says, We're casual; we like people; and we invite you here to help us enjoy our home.'"

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